


Recovery

by GavinConroy (Batsymomma11)



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Developing Relationship, Fluff, M/M, Male Friendship, Mild Language, Past Abuse, Pre-Relationship, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-13
Updated: 2019-05-13
Packaged: 2020-03-02 10:51:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,203
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18809578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Batsymomma11/pseuds/GavinConroy
Summary: Gavin Reed has finally gotten out of an abusive relationship and is struggling to find an equilibrium. Hank Anderson offers a shoulder and maybe a little more.





	Recovery

**Author's Note:**

> I do not own DC or its characters. I do own this story. 
> 
> Thanks for reading and enjoy!

“ Wanna  talk about it?”

“About what?”

“ Ya  know,  _ it _ . The thing you’ve been keeping to yourself for weeks. The thing that’s made you look like shit spread too thin on a piece of stale - ass toast. That thing. ”

Gavin looked up, found a pair of familiar sky - b lue eyes peering at him over the rim of the console, then shrugged. “Not much to talk about. It’s personal.”

“Nothing is personal in this joint.”

Gavin lifted a brow, “That so?”

“It is.”

“Well,” Gavin shoved back from his desk, grabbed his smokes and his jacket  then brushed past Anderson like he was nothing. Because that’s exactly what the old man was. Nothing. No one. Just another face, another voice, in another place he needed to show up and  keep his shit together at. “I’m stepping out for some air.”

“Since when do you smoke, Reed?”

Gavin didn’t bother answering.  Anderson didn’t really give a shit anyway. Not really. 

No one did. 

No one should. 

He found his usual perch on the roof empty, beside the snow-laden air conditioner and  a half-full ashtray of snubbed out cigarettes.  He lit up with his mind slipping, his hands a shaking mess and his stomach rolling with acid. Nothing felt like it should. 

Nothing. 

Not even the taste of nicotine and menthol in his mouth made the sour ache ebb. The cold didn’t jumpstart the lethargy in his bones or the sluggish tint to every goddamn thing.  It all remained unerringly empty and  blotchy. Empty. 

“Reed.”

Gavin lurched against the air conditioning unit, startled at the intrusion and dropped his lit cigarette into the snow. The  glowing ember at the tip immediately went out in the wet and he blinked dumbly at it .  

“What are you doing up here?”

“Smoking,” Gavin answered automatically, his eyes still stuck on the extinguished butt, “Why did you follow me?”

“Because you’ve been out of it for weeks. You look like shit. Everyone has started to worry about you. Even Connor mentioned how  fucking sickly you’re starting to look. So, I’m here, checking in.”

“Checking in?”

Anderson lifted a gray brow, “Yeah, it’s what friends do.”

“We aren’t friends.”

That was true.  Gavin and Hank Anderson had never been friends. Not really. They were colleagues  on the best  of  days and careful enemies on the worst. They shared very little in common with how they worked a crime scene let alone their work ethic or backgrounds. Gavin was notoriously difficult to work with and so was Anderson, but that was where their similarities ended. 

“ We could be.”

Gavin snorted, “Why? You don’t give a shit about me.”

No one did. 

“ Me up here on this roof, freezing my ass off with you, is giving a shit kiddo.”

Gavin blinked at Hank,  “Kiddo?”

Hank shrugged, “You’re what? Thirty?”

“Thirty-eight.”

“Ah. Well, still a good bit my junior. That makes you kiddo. At least for now. Don’t take it personal. I call everyone shorter than me kiddo.”

“Are you trying to piss me off, Anderson?”

“Is it working?”

Gavin stared at Hank. Hank stared right on back,  his breath coming out in a steady crystalline stream of white. “I’m fine. You’ve got nothing to worry about.”

“Even if I didn’t have eyes, which I do, I could tell you’re not fine.”

“I’m—going through a bit of a detox.”

“Like a juice cleanse? Really?”

Gavin snorted, “No, not like a juice cleanse. Like a single-person cleanse and it’s been—it’s been more difficult than expected to stay away. To just—detox this person from my life. That’s all. I’m fine.”

Hank shifted and the snow groaned as he moved nearer, his warmth  radiating in steady waves  off of  him towards Gavin. It was a struggle not to lean into it, to soak up more. Or to close his eyes and pretend the man near enough to touch wasn’t Hank at all. But another tall and imposing figure  that made the world right again. 

“You left him.”

Gavin’s eyes jumped to Hank’s, his stomach hollowing. 

Hank nodded slowly, something like a smile spreading on his mouth, “You left him.”

This time, Gavin nodded.

The truth of it, didn’t sound as daunting or broken in the bitter cold as it had weeks ago. It didn’t sound as strange or wrong either. It just—was. 

He  had left  Paul .

He’d left five weeks, four days, and twelve hours ago. Every second had felt like having his entrails pulled out his nostrils. Every minute, a mile of crawling on needles.  Every hour,  only drops in a bucket that would never be big enough to handle the lifetime of uncertainty and fears he was sure to experience without him. 

He’d been surviving. He’d been dragging ass and barely clawing his way from one day to the nex t,  but Gavin had been—surviving. He was still alive. 

And even though he wanted to take every pill in his cabinet or drink enough scotch till it all faded into nothing, he didn’t. He got up, he went to work, then he came back home and prepared to do it all over again. Gavin kept on, because he had to. Because he’d said as much when he’d left. 

He’d screamed  his truth loud enough the neighbors had called the cops and there had been a spectacle for the neighborhood to gossip over bridge  and checkers with for months. They’d taken photos of his black eye. Of the blood crusted up around his nose and in the collar  of his shirt. He’d blankly written a statement and then gone back to bed. A bed that was empty of one person because that person had been toted off in handcuffs. 

And it—it ended. 

He’d ended it. 

Gavin had finally done what he was supposed to. What he should have done  a year before when the aggression became shoving and the shoving became hitting. When he’d cried so hard after the first time he got knocked down in the bathroom and chipped a tooth that he threw up all over himself. 

“You did the right thing, Reed.”

Gavin was looking at his feet. At Anderson’s feet.  They were only a foot apart and Hank was wearing these godawful white tennis shoes that should have been retired a decade previous, but they were  familiar,  and  they were  Hank and they made  Gavin’s eyes burn. They made his throat tight and his hands slowly close into fists to stop the shaking that wanted to start. 

“It’s like an addiction.”

Gavin swallowed the rock in his throat, struggled to lift his gaze and let it meet Hank’s. “Yes.”

“Like you had to go cold turkey.”

“Y-yes.”

“Withdrawal is a bitch. But this is probably the best thing you could have done for yourself.”

Gavin  blinked a few times, struggling not to let the film of tears become tracks down his face, “That’s what I hear.”

“ ’C ause  it’s true. I know it’s your business— and you two were together for a long while. But it went bad. And he wasn’t going to stop.”

Gavin believed that. He did. 

It was why he left. It was why he’d finally gotten enough courage to  move out, find his own place, and try to pick up the pieces. 

But he still lay in bed at night and listened to old voicemail s  just to hear  Paul’s  voice. Gavin still fell asleep with an old t-shirt pressed to his face with the ever-fading smell of a man who  stopped being the one he fell in love with too long ago to even remember fully. 

Hank was right.

Paul had become an addiction. He’d become something unnatural to him. Gavin had learned to be dependent on him, desperate for affection, clinging to a reality that never existed in the first place. It had fucked with his mind so badly, that Gavin had been going through withdrawals  from Paul’s absence in his life like he was coming clean after a five-year bender. 

It was  excruciatingly  painful to realize how pathetic he’d become.

Hank  nodded ,  his eyes  careful in their study of him. Kind. “You’re in recovery, kiddo. It only gets better from here.”

Gavin  nodded, looking back down . He couldn’t trust his voice just yet. Not when he was certain it would crack. 

“Hey,” Hank was closer  then , his breath a warm heat on Gavin’s cheeks and  Gavin couldn’t lift eyes to look. He couldn’t move a muscle without breaking. Or doing something horrifically stupid, like crying. 

Warm fingers found his chin, forced it up and a wounded animalistic noise made it past Gavin’s vocal  chords . 

“It’s  gonna  be alright,” Hank said whisper-quiet, his  forehead brushing Gavin’s, lips soft and warm as they danced over one of Gavin’s cheeks , startling him,  “You did the right thing.”

“Hank?”

Hank ’s thumb brushed over the place he’d kissed on Gavin’s cheek, his expression so thoughtful, so soft in comparison to the  ones Gavin had seen on him before that he felt frozen. A stunned animal being tamed by  a  steadying hand. By pale blue eyes and  calloused fingers. 

Crinkles, white hair, and a crusty laugh. 

“Hank—I — what —”

“Don’t get your undies in a twist, kid,” Hank sighed, stepping back, breaking contact with Gavin and Gavin stumbled a little after him as heat flooded his face in embarrassment. 

“What the fuck, Hank?”

Hank shrugged, “It doesn’t have to mean anything.”

“And—and if I want it to?”

Hank’s smile was quicksilver fast, a remnant of his younger  years that made him look like the wolf in the fox’s  d en. “I’m not going anywhere. You know where my desk is. When you’re ready.”

Hank left Gavin on the roof. Bewildered and red-faced, his cigarette  long forgotte n. He stayed another couple of minutes,  chewing his lip and staring out over the PD parking lot below with an odd sense of something swirling in his gut. He couldn’t tell if it was a good feeling or simply a different one. One that made him uncertain . Or rather, unsettled. 

When he came back downstairs ten minutes later, there was a coffee sitting on his desk and a sticky note. The coffee was black, two sugars, just like he usually took it. And the sticky note simply had a phone number  with an address. 

The message printed in blocky all capitals beneath was familiar and made something warm and welcome blossom in Gavin’s chest. 

_ When you’re ready, kid. _

Gavin  got done with his reports early for the day. He showered mechanically, ate his dinner, fed the cat. Then he laid in bed for nearly an hour contemplating what to do, before deciding he was tired of second-guessing and worrying. 

Paul wasn’t there to tell him what to do or who to talk to or who not to talk to. He was free. He’d been free for weeks and he’d been acting like a prisoner in his own body. 

He picked up his phone, punched in Anderson’s number from memory and waited for the man to pick up on the third ring. 

_ “Anderson.” _

“It’s Gavin.”

_ “I’ve got caller ID. I know it’s you,  _ _ Reed _ _.” _

Gavin felt his mouth twitch, a smile struggling to make it onto his face and not quite succeeding. But it was the closest he’d been in too long to remember. “ You want to grab a beer after work on Friday?”

_ “Can’t.” _

Gavin frowned, “Oh.”

_ “Connor’s got me on some new diet. I can’t drink beer. It’s too fattening and bad for my numbers or some shit. But I c _ _ ould be persuaded to have a salad—”  _ There was a rustle, a whispered conversation that was more growling than speaking then,  _ “Change of plans. Connor wants you to come over for dinner. He’s cooking.” _

“I don’t—”

_ “Don’t be a fucking pussy, Reed. It’s just dinner _ _. _ _ ” _

Gavin shook his head, scrubbing a hand down his face. But he was smiling ,  and it felt like a weight had been lifted off his chest. Like whatever had been suffocating him was receding and he could breathe. 

“Fine. Tell Connor no fish.”

_ “I  _ _ ain’t _ __ _ gonna _ _  lie, it’ll probably be a salad with some  _ _ quinoa shit.” _

Gavin laughed, letting his eyes close as he listened to Connor saying something in an offended tone back to Hank. Hank responded with something only slightly  more charitable . But it was too garbled and snarly to tell for certain.

“ _ Be here at 7.” _

Gavin sighed,  nodding to himself, “I’ll be there. And uh—Hank?”

_ “What, kid?” _

“Thanks.”

Hank snorted,  _ “ _ _ Just don’t be late. Or there will be hell to pay _ _.” _

“Copy that.”

Gavin hung up. He laid back in his bed and for once, didn’t feel empty and naked without someone beside him. He didn’t feel like his skin was crawling and h e needed to build a wall of pillows just to help him sleep without Paul’s overbearing presence at his side. He felt—at peace? At rest? 

Whatever it was, it was better.  And he was impossibly grateful.

He fell asleep  to the memory of Hank’s calloused fingers on his chin. Of the man’s woodsy smell surrounding him and for once, Paul’s memories  didn’t haunt him. For once, he slept well. 


End file.
